Billy Bean: Accepting Who You Are
BIO: Billy Bean is a former Major League outfielder who played six seasons with the Detroit Tigers, Los Angeles Dodgers, and San Diego Padres. Billy is currently Vice President and Special Assistant to the Commissioner of MLB. He’s an advisor on LGBTQ and mental health and wellness issues. His memoir, Going the Other Way, chronicles his journey as a gay man in professional baseball.
WHEN DID YOU FIRST RECOGNIZE THE POWER OF YOUR VOICE?
My career ended abruptly when the secret that I was trying to hide became known, that I am gay. I was hiding a relationship when my partner died suddenly of HIV related causes the night before Opening Day of what was to be my last season. I grew up in a conservative military household, raised Catholic, and the oldest of five boys. I had never come out to anyone in my family or my friends. I was very young and just starting to realize my potential as a Major League baseball player. I was a product of the environment that I was raised in because I believed all the negative stereotypes about gay people. I had no information or experience or relationships with anyone else in the community that were truthful or honest.
Nobody knew who I was, except for my partner. He constituted my whole learning experience. He was my best friend and dealing with his death was an impossible task to try and pull off. I started to swirl down the drain of endless lies to try to protect the only thing that I didn't want people to know about me, and that was my sexual orientation. His death impacted me in ways that I was not prepared for. I did not really understand how toxic the closet is for people in my community, because I was somehow able to live a divided life.
As an athlete, I was always being accounted for in a group of people. I had a game of some kind every single day my whole life, and so I did not know people in the gay community. I didn't even come to understand what my sexual orientation was until four years into my marriage with my college sweetheart. It’s one of those things looking back at the beauty of being naïve, just following my heart. I made a lot of mistakes and some really awful decisions. When my partner passed away, I did not attend his funeral. I did not ever get a chance to introduce him to my family, so nobody knew what I was going through.
Once that last season ended, and I was out of the structure of having to be somewhere all the time, that was when the reality of what had happened started to really settle in. It was very quiet around me, and I started to feel very fragile. I wasn't going to be able to continue the lie. What I needed was not to stop playing baseball. What I needed was someone to confide in, and I did not give myself that opportunity.
I was out of baseball for a long time and never dreamed that I would find my way back. The great irony is that I thought I would live in obscurity. I never intended to come out of the closet. I didn't have a plan. I just lived in that space, but I felt like I let myself and my family down. As an athlete, I expected to have much more success at the big league level. I ran as far away from baseball as I could. I moved to Miami Beach. I got a dog. The best, best buddy ever, a Jack Russell Terrier named Paco. It took a while, but as I started to meet people in my community, that's how my story ended up coming forward. They were the ones saying that I could really impact others who have lived a similar experience.
That formed my perspective about communication and trying to build bridges with athletes and allies, people or athletes who might be harboring the same type of personal secret that I did. I got outside of my little closet, and I felt some purpose. That is a wonderful driver where maybe my life does mean more than getting two hits in a game and trying to make the Hall of Fame, a goal that was self-serving.
HOW DO YOU USE THE POWER OF YOUR VOICE?
I had some impactful experiences because of amazing organizations like the Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) and the encouragement from people within my community. There were a few times where I was speaking, and I was very nervous to speak to large groups of people. One of the most important moments happened when I sat next to Judy Shepard at a luncheon about a year and a half after her son, Matthew, was murdered. Judy is an amazing example of someone who was finding a way to survive as she was thrust into a civil rights platform because her child was murdered. I could not find the words I wanted to say to her. I told her how sorry I was, and she told me how excited Matthew would have been to meet me, a big league baseball player. She might as well have punched me in the face.
Here's a kid who, in the early ‘90s, was brave enough to walk down the halls of his high school in Laramie, Wyoming, his best self - out. That’s not easy, because our communities are still struggling. Our kids are disproportionately the targets of bullies. I was a grown man with a lot of opportunities, and I was afraid to even talk to my parents about myself.
Judy said I would have been a hero to Matthew. I'm thinking, what defines a hero? Matthew seemed to exemplify every one of the things that I wish that I had or wasn't capable of at the time. I told her, ‘I don't know what to say to these people.’ And, she said, ‘You just have to be yourself. You are where you're supposed to be.’
Many times I think about Matthew, or about kids who were one conversation away from self-harm, or parents who lost a child, or pushed a child away, because they are firmly embedded in a belief system. I stopped feeling sorry for myself, and I said, ‘That's something I can do. I can go in there and go to battle for someone else.’ It felt urgent to talk on behalf of others. When I started to learn about all the ways that people were trying to limit equality and take civil rights away or fight against the advancement for equality, then I started to get a little worked up.
Around 2013 I got a call from MLB. They were going to expand their workplace protection policy and include sexual orientation for the very first time. I’m pretty certain there were no out gay executives on the business side at the time. You need representation to create conversations. You need more voices in the room. Thanks to some cool leaders in the league, they understood that they needed to get in line with the times. I think they started to see an opportunity that I might be a good communicator for why we were doing something like that and bring some context to it.
In 153 years of Major League Baseball, there have only been two players who have ever come out – Glenn Burke and myself. It just goes to show you how easily stereotypes are perpetuated. Our commissioner said to me, ‘Don't ever forget that you played. When you're talking to the player, they will always respect that.’
I was brought on as the first MLB Ambassador for Inclusion. It was a job with no description, and it has grown quite a bit. It's all because of the success of those initial conversations that allowed us to push for education initiatives for our players, off field development conversations, a bullying prevention campaign, and then, mental wellness. I kept sharing how I could have used resources like that when I played and how it would have changed my life. A lot of times when people want to talk about mental health, and they're looking for hard statistics and metrics that prove its value, but most people don't want to talk about their experience. We don't get a lot of acknowledgement for the work that's going on, but it’s never been more valuable and more important.
What's really been an amazing phenomenon in recent times, starting with Kevin Love and DeMar DeRozan and then Michael Phelps, of course, Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka, are these high visible world class athletes, sharing that they are human beings. All of a sudden, all these players were reaching out to me to talk. I became kind of a point person, for the amazing medical community and medical healthcare professionals that we have that are part of baseball. It’s a great example of learning from each other, how influential that can be, and how many people that we have helped
One of the really great results is a program we started called Ahead in the Count. Since 2017, I have literally spoken to every drafted player and every minor league free agent that’s signed. Now that I've been around a while, the players know who I am. There's a sense of familiarity and some consistency in the message about LGBTQ acceptance and respect. We've socialized why it's important and why we want every fan that comes to a baseball game to feel welcome. We explain how homophobia is braided in sexism and racism and classism in ways that it makes sense to them.
Life is challenging for everyone, no matter where you are in the spectrum of success or race or gender or sexual orientation. We're all a part of one big family, and that's the human race. Our work is allowing for those who don't have that initiative to talk about it to pursue those resources. I feel so indebted to baseball for the opportunity to talk about ways that we can be better.
WHAT DOES ATHLETES’ VOICES MEAN TO YOU?
Athletes’ Voices is so amazing in that it includes the perspectives of people who have dedicated their lives and made sacrifices and are committed. Your body will let you down. It’s a very tricky little instrument to play. You have to make sacrifices, and you learn so much along the way. You see so many other people who were gifted in wonderful ways that were unable to make that one sacrifice, or two, and that is the reason they're not at the top of their sport. Or, you meet someone who’s overcome the odds, like a Chris Waddell, and inspires millions of people. I don't know if opportunities for athletes before me existed for them to use a platform in that way.
I remember seeing Roy Campanella as I was growing up, and when I was in the Dodger organization, and feeling so overwhelmed at the unfairness. He could have been the greatest baseball player of all time. The beauty and the humble nature of his personality after his career, where he could have died of bitterness, and it would be so easy to understand. That perspective didn't resonate on me the way that it does now.
I feel like my job is to run that baton as far forward as I can and hand it off to the next person. We start to see all these examples of an easing of the fear of using your platform, and the individuality blossoming across all sports, and the beauty that nobody's distinctively one thing or another and how that can light up a child's life. To feel like I can make an impact on this world, it is really an amazing responsibility.
